The Slynx

Cover Art for 9781590171967, The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
ISBN: 9781590171967
Publisher: NY Review Books
Published: 15 June, 2007
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Links
Editions:
1 other edition of this product

Ten years in the writing, Tatyana Tolstaya’s only novel, THE SLYNX, takes place some two hundred years after “the Blast” put an end to civilization. People in this post-apocalyptic world eat mice and worms and have forgotten how to make a fire. In the aftermath of the Blast, they suffer from what they call “consequences,” ranging from tails to claws to gills, and they get around on “degenerators,” mutant half-humans who run on all fours. It is a sad excuse for a life, but to our hero, Benedikt, it seems cozy enough. After all, he’s happily employed as a scribe, copying various texts - including some that may seem surprisingly familiar to readers - said to be composed by Fedor Kuzmin, Glorybe, the Great Leader of this squalid land, where all other literature is prohibited to the people on pain of death.All this is the familiar stuff of dystopian fiction. Tolstaya’s virtuosic trick is, however, to turn it into pure vaudeville, though vaudeville that packs a serious punch. Benedikt, the little man, is lifted into a life of privilege and given access to the books. Before long, indeed, he has become a true book-lover - which is to say, the bibliophile from hell.Like Nabokov’s PALE FIRE, Tolstaya’s novel is a shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of an utterly degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Shop Preferences

Customize which shops to display. You can include the following shops by logging in to change your settings.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Historical Prices

Loading...
This graph is for informational purposes only. Occasionally pricing data is captured incorrectly, through bugs in Booko or the stores supplying data, which may distort the graph, providing undue hope that even lower prices sometimes appear.

Recently Updated